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Emancipatory politics always consists in making seem possible precisely that which, from within the situation, is declared to be impossible.

Alain Badiou

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Alain Badiou
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: January 17
Editor
Mathematician
Novelist
Philosopher
Playwright
Sociologist
University Teacher
New Sallee
Within
Declared
Making
Precisely
Seems
Consists
Always
Seem
Impossible
Situation
Possible
Politics

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The absolute contingency of the encounter takes on the appearance of destiny. The declaration of love marks the transition from chance to destiny and that's why it is so perilous and so burdened with a kind of horrifying stage fright.
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What kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one? What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity? That is what I believe love to be.
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In order to improve democracy, then, it's necessary to change the people, as Brecht ironically proposed.
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All resistance is a rupture with what is. And every rupture begins, for those engaged in it, through a rupture with oneself.
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We have the riots we deserve.
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Love without risk is an impossibility, like war without death.
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For a politics of emancipation, the enemy that is to be feared most is not repression at the hands of the established order. It is the interiority of nihilism, and the unbounded cruelty that can come with its emptiness.
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Liberal capitalism is not at all the Good of humanity. Quite the contrary it is the vehicle of savage, destructive nihilism.
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If you limit yourself to sexual pleasure it's narcissistic. You don't connect with the other, you take what pleasure you want from them.
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Truth is a new word in Europe (and elsewhere).
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There is no ethics in general. There are only-eventually-ethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation.
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Those who have nothing have only their discipline.
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To believe that the intolerable crime is to burn a few cars and rob some shops, whereas to kill a young man is trivial, is typically in keeping with what Marx regarded as the principal alienation of capitalism: the primacy of things over existence, of commodities over life and machines over workers
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Love is not a contract between two narcissists.
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In love, fidelity signifies this extended victory: the randomness of an encounter defeated day after day through the invention of what will endure.
Alain Badiou
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We could say that love is a tenacious adventure. The adventurous side is necessary, but equally so is the need for tenacity. To give up at the first hurdle, the first quarrel, is only to distort love. Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world.
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Without mathematics, we are blind.
Alain Badiou
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It is thus quite simply false that whereof one cannot speak (in the sense of 'there is nothing to say about it that specifies it and grants it separating properties'), thereof one must be silent. It must on the contrary be named.
Alain Badiou
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Love and politics are the two great figures of social engagement. Politics is enthusiasm with a collective with love, two people. So love is the minimal form of communism.
Alain Badiou
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It must be said that today, at the end of its semantic evolution, the word 'terrorist' is an intrinsically propagandistic term. It has no neutral readability. It dispenses with all reasoned examination of political situations, of their causes and consequences.
Alain Badiou